Back on January 28, 2024 I wrote a post originally slated to be titled “New Hugo Site” as a welcome to my revamped site. I’ve edited a bit, but I figured it is still worth posting. The image associated with this post was the original image on the landing page of my site when it was, in fact, new.
At the time, I had decided to revamp my personal site to move the blog more to the background. I intended to have other upcoming projects, one of which was going to include a separate blog, so I wanted this blog to be less prominent than it had been on my original (very short lived) WordPress site. Funny how the posts are now back on the front page of my site 😎
As I started what should have been a simple/quick task to remove the blog from the main page of my WordPress site, I quickly became bogged down in the WordPress admin panel. This led me to the decision to migrate the site to Hugo after some positive experiences with it on another (now dead) project. So, after only a few months on WordPress, this site was born (and then received very few updates over the better part of two years).
I find the workflow of writing markdown and testing locally in Hugo, and then pushing to a git repository–where the site is automatically published via a web-hook to my hosting provider–to be very straightforward once it’s set up. It sounds complicated, but the setup didn’t seem to take me any longer than the provider-guided WordPress setup. In both cases, choosing the theme and learning to work with it took the most time, and I simply didn’t like the workflow of opening up the WordPress admin panel every time I wanted to publish a blog post. I’m sure there’s a plugin to fix that, but the need for several plugins for my simple site is another reason I’m not in love with WordPress.
The Hugo workflow has the added benefits of a local test environment for the site, proper version control, and a way to make sure I have proper backups, so it’s a win all around!
At least I still like Hugo and the associated workflow after two years 😁
Maybe in the next couple of years I’ll finally get to moving the source for this site into a public repository 🤷